‘What do you want?’ ‘We want our work done’

Rosa Silveira

Rosa Silveira, of San Antonio, Texas, and originally from California, has been doing family history research about 50 years, ever since she joined the LDS Church as a teenager. She shares this story, which was very impressive to her and her family.

“About five years ago I was working on a family history project really late one night. You know how sometimes it’s hard to quit? I was getting tired. Then I came across a group of people that were loosely related to my grandmother, her distant cousins. I felt I shouldn't bother to include them. So I decided to go to bed.

“But as I tried to go to sleep, I started to see images—faces of people

with beards, people wearing hats. In my mind, I asked them, ‘Who are you?’ They answered, ‘We are the Archibalds.’ That was the name of the family of people I had decided not to bother with.

‘What do you want?’ I asked them. ‘We want our work done,’ they said. So I got up and got all their names ready to submit to temple.

“The next day I got a call from a woman who said her name was Mary

Archibald—it was the same name as the people I had been looking at. She said she was my new visiting teaching partner. I told her about the Archibalds, whose names I had ready for the temple. We made arrangements to meet. I took the names to her and said, ‘’Here you are. They are yours.’ They took care of them and did all the temple work.”

In another experience, Rose was working in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City when a woman came up asking for help to find a naturalization record for an ancestor. Rose asked what she knew about him. She said, “I have this picture and he's in uniform. People tell me it's not an American uniform.”

Rose, who is “kind of a history buff,” recognized it as an American uniform from World War I. “Let's look for his World War I draft card,” she told the woman. They found it, and on his World War I draft card was the city in Germany where he was from.

“This woman had been to Germany looking to find where this ancestor had lived, but couldn't find it because his name was too common,” she says. “The information she needed was on his draft card.”